been something in it. Then with regard to the
shaking of a window-casement; this might easily have been occasioned by
the flight of a bird.[242] He was certainly less inclined to put faith in
the warnings of the stars and in the lines of his hand. His line of life
was very short and irregular, intersected and bifurcated, while the rest
of the lines were little thicker than hairs. In his horoscope was a
certain malefic influence which threatened that his life would be cut
short before his forty-fifth year. "But," he writes in the year before his
death, "here I am, living at the age of seventy-five."[243] The one
supernatural idea which seems to have deepened with old age and remained
undisturbed to the end was his belief in his attendant genius. In what he
wrote during his last years his mood was almost entirely introspective,
contemplative, and didactic, yet here and there he introduces a sentence
which lets in a little light from his way of life and personal affairs,
and helps to show how he occupied himself, and what his humour was. He
tells how one day, in 1576, he was writing about the fennel plant in his
treatise _De Tuenda Sanitate_, a plant which he praised highly because it
pleased his palate. But shortly afterwards, when he was walking one day in
the Roman vegetable market, an old man, shabbily dressed, met him and
dissuaded him from the use of the plant aforesaid, saying: "In Galen's
opinion you may as readily meet your death thereby as by eating hemlock."
"I answered that I knew well enough the difference between hemlock and
fennel, but the old man said, 'Take care, I know what I am saying,' and
went on murmuring something about Galen. Whereupon I went home and found
in Galen a passage I had not hitherto noticed, and, having changed my
former views, I added many fresh excerpts to my treatise."

Although his faith may have been shaken in the ability of the stars to
govern his own fortunes, he records a case in which he himself filled the
post of _vates_, and which came to a sudden and terrible issue. Cardan was
present at a supper-party, and in the course of conversation let fall the
remark, "I should like to say something, were I not afraid that my words
would disturb the company," to which one of the guests replied, "You mean
that you would prophesy death to one of us here present." Cardan replied,
"Yes, within the present year," and in the next sentence he tells how on
the first day of December in that same y